Wall Street’s Hands on Cruise Ships / EXCLUSIVE

Miami - Carnival Corporation, the global cruise ship giant which also owns the Genoese company Costa, is now under the control of Wall Street: the world of the stock market and U.S. finance are taking over the helm of the company from Micky Arison, the son of the founder of the Miami-based group and current president of the company who owns over 45% of the company’s stock. The leaks that have emerged in recent hours from Florida have been confirmed. At the end of last week, Arison and his sister Shari, one of the richest women in Israel, sold over 10 million shares, for a value of $468 million, repeating an identical operation completed only a month ago. On the whole, therefore, the man who until yesterday was recognised as the absolute leader in sea vacations has sold 20 million Carnival shares for a total of about a billion dollars. However, Micky Arison and his family still control 25% of the group’s stock listed in New York and on the London Stock Exchange. But it is clear that everything has radically changed. And it has gradually become clear that these sales, which were initially explained by a desire to diversify the business and its investments, obviously represent a declining enthusiasm for Carnival.

This epilogue was perhaps a foregone conclusion after a season of tragedies like the Concordia disaster, other accidents, and most importantly, disagreements within the group and between Carnival and Wall Street. In the end the winner is the financial system in which there is nothing of the tradition and spirit of shipowning, a system that celebrates the supremacy of finance and the priority of numbers and irreversibly penalises the individual. Even if the latter has a stable position at the heights of New York finance. The downsizing of Arison’s stake in the cruise business is a very significant surprise which was unthinkable until yesterday. It will certainly have a considerable effect on the world of shipping and finance. Micky is 66 years old and Israeli by origin, a naturalised American citizen. He owns the NBA basketball team the Miami Heat, and has a fortune that is reported to be about $5 billion. He is not merely sole heir and leader of the business that his father Ted Arison bravely launched in 1972. Most importantly he is the charismatic chief of Carnival, the symbol of the global cruise business, and the Miami-based giant’s most important shareholder. He is a strategist who has used marketing and communication as a winning weapon to revolutionise the concept of the cruise itself, transforming it from an elite vacation to a mass phenomenon. Micky Arison, who is now handing over control of the group to Wall Street, was never truly a shipowner. He has shown himself to be a great entrepreneur who after having conquered the tourist market, was able to improve the quality of his services, betting on ever larger ships built by Fincantieri. He acquired the ownership of almost all the cruise ship companies operating in the United States and in Europe, to the point that he owned a fleet of 100 ships and controlled 50% of the global market, with a capacity to transport 10 million passengers. The business was worth a total of $1.5 billion per year. So it is surprising that Carnival will no longer be a family business, and will become another instrument in the hands of the stock markets and investors.

This case will certainly affect market equilibrium and strategies. Is this the delayed effect of the Costa Concordia tragedy? Probably, but there are other reasons, too. The “poop cruise,” for example, has not been forgotten - it was the other accident that is still affecting American public opinion, a disaster that affected the Triumph Carnival in 2013, when all of its bathrooms went out of service. In any case, the most attentive and credible observers blame the disastrous manoeuvre off the Island of Giglio for what subsequently occurred. A continuous day of reckoning and change of management in the group both in America and Europe, whose epilogue is still playing out in Genoa for the historical Italian brand Costa Cruises. The priorities of finance are overshadowing centuries-old traditions and the know-how of sailors all over world. These priorities affect the evolution of the market, the relationships within companies, and changes in management. And very probably, they also affect Micky Arison personally.